Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban yells at the officials during a game against the Utah Jazz.

By

JillianBerman

Reporter

The liberal arts education could be in danger if policy makers adopt a popular, bipartisan reform to curb student debt, according to Mark Cuban.

The entrepreneur, Dallas Mavericks owner and “Shark Tank” star argued that requiring colleges to take some responsibility for their graduates’ student loan repayment rates could “push liberal arts colleges and programs to the point of extinction,” in a several paragraph critique of Hillary Clinton’s student debt plan that he published on his messaging app Cyberdust last week.

His argument—one of several he made in the post—is essentially that because liberal arts graduates tend to earn less than their counterparts with technology or engineering degrees, they’ll struggle more to pay off their loans. Holding schools responsible for their graduates’ ability to pay off their debts could push them to eliminate any programs where graduates typically earn low wages.

Though Cuban’s comments were focused on Clinton’s proposal, other policy makers have expressed support for the idea that colleges should lose access to federal financial aid funding if their graduates fall below certain student loan repayment or default rates, known as “skin in the game.” Two Senators—one from each party—introduced a bill earlier this month that would require colleges to fork over a portion of their federal loan dollars that students aren’t paying back successfully. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), the chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, has said he’d like some kind of skin-in-the game provision to be included in the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act.

These proposals probably wouldn’t have the effect that Cuban suggests, says Ben Miller, the senior director for postsecondary education at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank. Instead, these kinds of risk-sharing proposals would likely weed out high-cost certificate programs with a track record of graduates earning low-level wages. “The federal government has a reason to be concerned about programs that can’t get people above the poverty line,” he said. “If a risk-sharing regime results in fewer overpriced medical assisting degrees, that’s a feature not a bug.”

Graduates with liberal arts degrees, on the other hand, typically earn “reasonable wages,” Miller says—about $51,000 for arts and humanities graduates and $60,000 for social sciences graduates on average for workers between the ages of 25-59, according to Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce—and there’s little evidence to suggest that liberal arts majors struggle more than other four-year-degree holders to pay back their loans. That means if the government holds colleges to a standard requiring that most graduates pay off their debts successfully, having more liberal arts majors wouldn’t necessarily hurt the schools’ ability to meet that metric.

“Even if liberal arts majors make less than an engineering graduate, they’re still probably pulling way more than a lot of certificate graduates are,” Miller said. “We tend to just assume liberal arts equals low pay because it lacks a clear set of occupations for people to go into, but there’s lots of people with English degrees, philosophy degrees who are doing just fine, they’re just not working as English teachers or philosophers.”

Still, higher education is already well into a decades-long shift of “market rationalization” from a system focused on social sciences and liberal arts to one that’s focused largely on careers, said Anthony Carnevale, the director of the Georgetown center. The only question is whether how much farther it will go and whether risk-sharing plans might accelerate that process. Right now, bachelor’s degree recipients only take about 30% of the courses in their major, but it’s possible as colleges and policy makers become even more focused on career outcomes that general education requirements could just completely fall away, he said.

And even if risk-sharing regulations don’t force colleges to shutter their liberal arts departments outright, the rules and the increased transparency about the success of certain college programs, could steer students away from these lower-paying fields, he said. “Humanities and social sciences are the slow boat to economic independence,” he said. “Better information is going to make it more likely that (students) will go and they’ll succeed, but less likely that they’ll take the slow boat.”

Liberal arts degrees likely won’t disappear completely, Carnevale said. Instead, he’s concerned that focusing too heavily on the return on investment of a college degree will result in “rich kids” getting a general education in the form of a bachelor’s degree and then going on to graduate school to specialize, while low-income students for whom affordability is more of a concern are shuttled into job training programs right away. Cuban made a similar point in his post, arguing that risk-sharing plans would mean that a “liberal arts education disappears for anyone not already rich.”

“There’s an underlying equity question here,” Carnevale said. “It’s sad that general education and the humanities and social sciences and other areas that people get with a BA is now the kind of education that comes with class privilege and preserves class privilege.”

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